Waste to Energy is Green-washing

Sweden is burning your trash and unsold clothes
And it's being touted as an environmentally applaudable behaviour.
This is green-washing at its peak.
Incineration/waste to energy (W2E) is second last on the waste management hierarchy.

Simply it means they burn the garbage to produce heat which makes steam which runs a turbine. It's not very energetically efficient, and it requires a lot of big machinery and filter systems to ensure the pollution doesn't escape and spread its toxic vapours everywhere. And then they must safely dispose of the concentrated chemical ash.

But what I find most troubling about W2E is that they lock cities and countries into contracts, assuring they provide a certain amount of feedstock / garbage each year. This sways the motivation away from reducing waste in the first place, and instead towards the perpetuation of our over-consumptive materialist culture. There's no incentive to implement zero waste practices or change behaviour to have less of a footprint.  These W2E companies are halting our progress towards a sustainable low impact crade-to-cradle society. All because they're out to make money, and need to produce a certain amount of energy they can sell back to the city.

I could go on at length about this topic, but  I'll leave it short and sweet for now.
A great resource where I found my information is the book:

The Zero Waste Solution:
Untrashing the Planet One Community at a Time
By Paul Connett

Read more about it at that link. And educate yourself about these greenwashing ploys pretending to be 'zero-waste'. True zero waste starts by avoiding the production of garbage in the first place! We need to change the way our system is designed, and as consumers we need to bring less single use plastics into our homes.

And of course buy thrift! The clothing industry is a whole other topic I'll cover at another time.